history is full of people who die for theory.
Can we go back to
? How did you decide on the order of the sections? Until I went to the atlas, I thought perhaps you traveled in a circle.
Except for the end of the film, which leads us back to the opening sequences,
is organized in the geographical order of my itinerary: from one country, one region, to another. Each location is indicated by, having the names of the people and the country appear briefly on the screen, more as a footnote than as a name tag or a validating marker. The sound track is, however, more playful: a statement made by a member of a specific group may be repeated in geographical contexts that are different. Needless to say, this strategy has not failed to provoke hostility among 'experts' on African cultures, 'liberal' media specialists, and other cultural documentarians.
Apparently, some 'professional' viewers cannot distinguish between a signpost, whose presence only tells you where you are, and an arrangement that suggests more than one function at work. Depending on how one uses them, letters on an image have many functions, and viewers who abide by media formulas are often insensitive to this. For me, the footnotes or the names that appear on screen allow precisely the non-expert viewer to recognize that a few selected statements issued by one source or heard in one group are repeated
borderlines of ethnic specificities. Thus, the names also function as acknowledgment of the strategical play of the film, my manipulations as filmmaker.
The deliberate act of taking, for example, a Dogon [Mali] statement on adornment and desire or on the house as a woman, and juxtaposing it with specific images of dwellings among the Kabye [Togo] and then again, among the Birifor [Burkina Faso] is a taboo among experts. What one ethnic group says can absolutely not be reproduced in the context of another group. This is also applicable in the film to quotes from Westerners, such as Paul Eluard's 'The earth is blue like an orange,' which is heard in a sequence on the Oualatans [Mauritania] as well as in a sequence on the Fon [Benin]. And I use a similar strategy in the music: in both
and
music from one group is first heard with that very group and then repeated with variations within other groups. The viewer is made aware of such 'violations' of borders.
There is a very interesting issue involved here. The peoples of third-world countries used to be lumped together in their undifferentiated otherness. And this is reflected pervasively in Western media discoursesradio, books, photos, films, television. You might have a program on Vietnam, for example, but you hear persistent Chinese
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music in the background. Even today, in many mainstream films on the Vietnam experience, the people cast in the Vietnamese roles are neighboring Southeast Asians who can hardly speak a word of Vietnamese. Of course, for many American viewers, it doesn't matter. Asians are Asians, and you can even take someone from the Philippines or from Korea to fill in the roles. Well, it's certainly the perpetuation of such attitudes that the cultural experts and anthropologists work against. And they should. But to rectify the master's colonialist mistakes, they have come up with disciplinarian guidelines and rules. One of them, for example, is that you always show the source of the music heard, and the music of one group must not be erroneously used in the context of another group. However, such rationalization also connotes a preoccupation with authenticity that supposes culture can be objectified and reified through 'data' and 'evidence.' The use of synch sound becomes binding and its validation as the most truthful way of documenting is taken for granted.
It is fine for me if the master's heirs are now correcting his errors to raise their own consciousness of other cultures. But when circumstantial and history-bound methods and techniques become validated as the norms for
films, then they prove to be very dangerous: once more an established frame of thinking, a prevailing system of presentation, is naturalized and seen as the only truthful and 'correct' way. Surely enough, these 'rules' are particularly binding when it is a question of third-world people: films made on white American culture, for example, can use classical music from any European source, and this hardly bothers any viewer. In
I neither reproduce the master's mistakes nor abide by disciplinarian criteria of correct representation; hence the importance of the naming of the peoples to acknowledge the deliberate gesture of carrying certain cultural statements across ethnic boundaries.
So the imagery is a kind of grid against which the spectator can consider your manipulations of sound.
Yes. One could certainly have a more restrained sound track, and let the images move back and forth across transcultural signs, but the choice here was to have that transgressive fluidity in the sound. The visuals, as we discussed earlier, have their own critical strategies. After all, boundaries are extremely arbitrary. Boundaries between nations are a recent phenomenon. The village people themselves refer to kinship boundaries, which are usually also the boundaries between different ethnic groups. And ethnic grouping cuts across geopolitical borderlines.
One activity that certainly confirms this idea is the pounding of grain, which we see in culture after culture.
At five o'clock in the morning, I would wake up and listen to
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that sound in most villages, and it would go on late into the evening. The day begins and ends with women pounding to prepare the meals. And yes, it is a collective background sound that you'll recognize in villages across Africa.
